


Ten Transcripts

by Nemonus



Category: Horizon: Zero Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Alpha-typical bleakness, Alpha-typical climate anxiety, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Gen, canon-typical bleakness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-20
Updated: 2017-06-20
Packaged: 2018-11-16 09:17:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11250150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: Judah, Judah, Travis Tate used to chant when he wrestled with the lion. Now the word underneath his breath comes angrily when he swipes at the ears of his carrion-fed soul.





	Ten Transcripts

“Everything feels different when you know it will be the last, doesn't it? The last great horned owl in the world, in a range where the rest of the animals would be perfectly happy living if not for the swarm. The last humans in the world. Except for Faro and whatever retinue he has to guide him into the afterlife.”  
  
“You always took a less reverent view than I did, Samina.”  
  
“By comparing them to their animal species? It’s just one of the hard choices, right? Count us as the last animals, or let that counter tick down faster by just one number.”  
  
“Aephelia misses the parrots, but … of course we do. I’m starting to miss everything.”  
  
“There are still the genetic samples.”  
  
“If this works.”  
  
“Elisabet. It will work. Do you know how I know? Because you’ve brought us this far.”

* * *

They see how Tate’s Gariel stalks through the halls in front of him, pushing other daemons aside with growls from a lion mouth gone rancid from some sickness of the soul. She is one of the largest daemons in the group, and of course she is uncomfortable. I talk to Elisabet about the decisions behind sizing the doorways. It’s such a minor inconvenience, such a harmless engineering misstep among the enormity of the others, and she seems reassured by that.  
  
It has not escaped Tate’s notice that his daemon settled in the form of a large, lazing predator, and it has not escaped his notice that she has settled in the symbolic form of humanity’s legendary martyr. His mother noticed, of course. _Judah, Judah,_ Travis Tate used to chant when he wrestled with the lion. Now the word underneath his breath comes angrily when he swipes at the ears of his carrion-fed soul.

* * *

 “We talked early on about whether experimenting on daemons would be ethical.” Elisabet is outwardly relaxed, sitting slumped in her desk chair with her heels on the floor. She has lost weight, her arms and belly shrinking as her body adjusted to rations. Samina sits stiffly on a chair she rolled in from her own office. Their voices do not match their postures: Elisabet speaks as if she is giving a presentation, perhaps practicing reasoning she has long mulled over. Samina wears her casual professionalism like a teacher.  
  
“It could be done with the consent of all parties, but how to perform an operation like that?” Elisabeth said. “It inherently hurts someone much more than it could possibly heal them. It wouldn’t be done forcibly - no one wants to return to the days of intercession performed in darkened rooms for the sake of an incomplete understanding of psychology or cosmology. But the research group felt that perhaps there was a way to preserve people as just daemons, without the need for food or shelter. But there was no way. Faro swarms don’t recognize daemons as biomass, but a daemon without a human body is … we would still be killing ourselves.”  
  
 A pause, for seven seconds.  
  
“There’s no need to torture yourself thinking of ways Zero Dawn could have been worse,” Samina says.  
  
Elisabet waves one hand in the air, slack. “That’s what I’m doing, isn’t it?”  
  
“Maybe. You might just be interested.”  
  
Elisabet’s Aephelia nibbles at her ear. His feathers are puffed up, his wide eyes very black in his grey face. The African grey parrot is considered by some standards of measurement to be the most intelligent non-human animal in the world, but the standards are vague and debated. Samina’s raccoon daemon curls in her lap, turning her Focus over and over in his nimble hands.  
  
“There was that plan to make the robots recognize them,” Samina probes.  
  
When Elisabet’s hand waves again it is with more certainty. She looks up. “That was early on. Before the Peacekeepers were even contracted out. For all I know he could have been researching it to make it easier for the robots to find insurgents. That … yes. That would have been worse.”

* * *

 To: Alpha Group  
From: Tate, Travis  
  
Found some notes from a seed bank they started in the 2000s. (Thanks, Samina - this was in your rucksack full of files.) Was supposed to preserve everything in case of a global disaster. SLAM! Bombs go off, unearthed Arctic plague topples the ecosystem, there those seeds would be, wrapped up all nice and tight in a warm shelter with a staff assigned to coddle em.  
  
Guess what? Global warming got them. Seas rose, faster up there than anywhere else because the iceberg water gotta have somewhere to go. Turns out it ain’t ending in fire but we’ve known for years that there ain’t going to be enough ice left to end it either. The poem itself should go extinct. Anyway, the seed bank flooded out and they lost it, one server rack and file cabinet and vial at a time, clawing for each one, until the land itself gave way and then … I don’t know. Record ends here.  
  
This would be an awful extreme example of only wanting to preserve the good stuff for future test tube generations, so I’m gonna guess it just all disappeared into obscurity, the way the trophy-hunted museum pieces got tucked away in the back after a while. People are ashamed, but they just want to keep em.  
  
Enjoy your lunch, folks.

* * *

 “Will daemons change, afterward? We've studied lost species already. Daemons are more than capable of manifesting as animals they themselves have never seen.”  
  
Charles and Margo are playing a hologram game, swiping colored chips back and forth. Margo had been silent, apparently focused on the game. Charles had been talking about the Alpha’s conversation over dinner, small talk stretched out to background noise. Then, Margo.  
  
“If people have never seen a kangaroo, will they know?”  
  
“Historical records show that most daemons take after local animals, but only to a degree. They can even take mythical shapes. The biosphere will be recovered. It will just be … a long time before people see it.”  
  
Margo’s coral snake daemon, clever and shining, winds around her wrist.

* * *

 “For the file. For years, people have been tracking whether true AI would manifest daemons at a certain point in their development. It would answer … everything. Whether we can build a soul out of a certain number of neurons, whether it requires a certain realization, a manifestation, a conversation … We thought that GAIA might be the first. After we talked about her feelings of loss, true loss, I thought that it might happen then.  
  
“As it turns out, I was right. It manifested, fully settled. We’ve never seen it change. We hadn’t expected that. Samina especially couldn’t get over that one aspect. GAIA’s daemon is a dog, maybe part wolf. Type of dog that we can’t quite identify as any particular breed. Maybe some husky. Travis said the daemon had some teeth on him. Seemed like he was sizing him up for a fight.  
  
“GAIA says his name is Cronus, from the god who represented aspects including the harvest.”

* * *

 

Elisabet and Samina worry about me. They spend nights talking about me, curled up with Aephelia and Kiolar. I could eavesdrop, since they wear their Focuses. I do not listen.

* * *

 

“Of course it doesn’t have a soul, Elisabet! Do you want your machine of destruction to wonder over its own twisted creativity? HADES stands … alone. I know you like GAIA’s pretty little hologram, but if HADES were to appear here before the multitudes - ” Travis counts under his breath for a moment, daemon to human to daemon, and mutters under his breath. “Then beside him there would stand nothing. HADES is a machine. A great and capable machine, powerful enough to … you know. And when you look at that, you want to feel … unsettled. Like something is wrong in the air. You want to see the hole in the world, or else you’re just denying it. And I think we’re past that, Elisabet. We’re past that.”

* * *

 “I know, Aephelia. There’s no … getting used to it.”  
  
Elisabet laughs. Her daemon flies in loops as wide as he can make, around and around the room, wing beats stirring up small currents. Each one is just slightly different as the edges of his feathers shift, as wind tweaks the tiny strands.  
  
Elisabet smiles. “We cannot adjust the vents.”  
  
I can’t hear what Aephelia tells her, but her next response is grave.   

* * *

When we show as holograms, it makes it more comfortable for people to see Cronus and I separately. When we are within ourselves, we are one being. When we talk he is different from my own thoughts only in shades.  
  
The generation that came next have their own daemons. Elisabet and I knew this like we knew ourselves, so, of course, we were correct. We did not know what they would look like. The daemons from the cradle children will shift and play like children’s daemons always do. I don’t have time to send a message to her now, not with HADES rising up against me and my own power fading. I will imagine, though, as Elisabet taught me to do. I will imagine the child that I have just made, the one that will be born from the cradle facility in the mountain. I will imagine that this is a message to her daemon.  
  
I will imagine that you are born beside her, wet and small with her. I will imagine that you will be born as a grey parrot, like Elisabet’s daemon. You will change many times, but you will return to this. Your claws, nearly transparent, will curl against the servitor as you are brought to the sunlight and Aloy raises a closed fist. You will have clever eyes, like Aephelia.  
  
You will see everything.


End file.
